Kellanova’s Louise Cotterill on Turning Clean Room Data Into Sales Impact and Cultural Change

Summary

BRAVE COMMERCE Podcast Summary

Episode: Kellanova’s Louise Cotterill on Turning Clean Room Data Into Sales Impact and Cultural Change
Date: November 11, 2025
Host: Adweek (Rachel Tipograph & Sarah Hofstetter)
Guest: Lou (Louise) Cotterill, Global Senior Director Insights and Intelligence at Kellanova
Location: Recorded live at Grocery Shop

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the real-world impact of data clean rooms, AI, and data-driven marketing at Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s). Lou Cotterill discusses how to transform vast and complex data into tangible sales results and lasting cultural change within a large CPG organization. The conversation highlights how to win executive buy-in, create actionable insights, foster organizational collaboration, and the critical role of curiosity and pragmatism in a tech-driven marketing future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Importance of Sales-Focused Marketing Metrics

• [07:18] Lou stresses that the language executives speak is sales. Marketers gain a seat at the table by demonstrating direct, measurable sales impact—not just brand or engagement metrics.

  “If you want to have a seat at the table for the executives, you have to speak their language. And the language they speak is sales.”
  — Lou Cotterill [07:26]

• Clean rooms, for the first time, enable marketers to credibly claim, “this business outcome happened exclusively because of my advertising.”

  “There is no better feeling than walking in and being able to show to that CFO that lift, that impact in the terms they explicitly want to talk about.”
  — Lou Cotterill [07:48]

What is a Clean Room & How Does Kellanova Use It?

• [08:43] Clean rooms aggregate and anonymize retailer and shopper data to create highly actionable, privacy-compliant audiences.

  “Within [our own clean room tenant], we were able to decide what data came in and…what models we wanted to build in order to prioritize and really reflect the business results we were looking for.”
  — Lou Cotterill [09:02]

• Kellanova stands up their own clean room tenants rather than relying solely on retailer clean rooms—controlling costs, customization, and modeling approaches.
  • This enables “closed-loop” impact measurement—knowing not only what worked, but who it worked with and why.

Embedding AI and Building Team Culture for Data-Driven Change

• [13:31] Lou’s role is as much about the cultural process as the technology:
  • Leadership must be open to new ways of working.
  • The organization must act on what the data shows, even if it upends assumptions.

  “You have to have a leadership that's open to a different way of doing things… and if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [13:35]

• Business-as-usual targeting continues alongside clean room-driven targeting, so teams feel safe to experiment without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Reducing Bias and Ensuring Actionability in Data

• [16:24] Use independent data science teams for audience discovery (to avoid bias), and third-party measurement for verifying sales impact.

  “They’ve got no skin in the game. They just produce what the models tell them… then independent, verified measurement... is really critical as well.”
  — Lou Cotterill [16:30]

Executive Alignment and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• [17:43] Success requires everyone aligning behind solving a single, common business problem—resisting the urge to focus only on their own functional KPIs.

  “It's really important… that everyone has a line behind the one common problem… getting a unification of what the problem is, so that you're pulling the right levers at the right time in the right sequence.”
  — Lou Cotterill [17:59]

• Cohesive KPIs across teams foster unity and help avoid vanity metrics or siloed successes.

Special K UK Case Study: Actioning Audience Data for Sales Impact

• [19:17] Special K faced declining volume & parity with private label during a cost-of-living crisis.
  • Business-as-usual targeting (one creative, one audience) was inefficient.
  • Clean rooms allowed building large “behavioral” cohorts—beyond basic demographics—across multiple addressable datasets (despite lacking 1P data).
  • Creative and media were tailored to these behavioral segments.
  • Result: 36% sales uplift vs. control.

  “Special K at 36% sales uplift versus the control, which was a phenomenal result for us.”
  — Lou Cotterill [21:13]

Organizational Change: Crawl, Walk, Run

• Clean rooms started as a tactical tool, then insights expanded upstream to inform creative briefs, media strategies, and broader measurement.
• Embedding change means considering not only business outcomes, but also team wellbeing, process alignment, tech partnership fit, and sustained behavioral change.

  “Unless you can actually embed a change, it isn’t going to sustain… behavior change is really critical because otherwise, you can’t sustain it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [22:41]

The Future of Personalized Marketing & Clean Rooms

• Marketers must balance AI’s promise with realism:
  • True one-to-one personalization isn’t commercially or technically feasible at large scale today.
  • Marketers should “meet the consumer where they are”—whether personalization is static, dynamic, or somewhere in between.
  • Clean rooms (and agentic AI) are still in their infancy, evolving rapidly but requiring pragmatism.

  “The key is that you've got to meet the consumer where they are and meet their expectations. And that’s the number one thing a marketer has to do.”
  — Lou Cotterill [25:17]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Action-Oriented Culture:

  “You have to be open that if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [02:13], [13:35]

• Eliminating Bias:

  “The starting model is the data science team…I can tell you they've got no real sort of strong feelings about who Special K should be and no bias in legacy data like our marketers have.”
  — Lou Cotterill [16:24]

• Meeting Consumers Where They Are:

  “Where we're moving to is a more dynamic picture of who the consumer is. The key is that you've got to meet the consumer where they are and meet their expectations.”
  — Lou Cotterill [25:17]

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Key Timestamps

• [02:13], [13:35]: Action on data without bias
• [07:18]: Speaking the language of the CFO & sales impact
• [08:43]: What’s a clean room, and Kellanova’s approach
• [13:31]: Organizational prerequisites for data-driven change
• [16:24]: How to eliminate internal data bias
• [17:43]: The necessity of unified KPIs
• [19:17]: Special K case study – audience segmentation and real-world results
• [21:51]: Connecting people, product, placement for cohesive execution
• [24:10]: Honest assessment of AI and practical personalization
• [26:44]: Being pragmatic and learning as you go
• [26:52]: Bravest thing professionally: admitting non-stellar results and asking for more
• [27:39]: Bravest personal story: living with nomadic eagle hunters in Mongolia

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Personal & Human Insights

• Professional Bravery:

  • Lou’s bravest professional act was admitting less-than-stellar results to top execs and still asking for continued investment.

    “The bravest thing was walking into a global meeting...telling them we had not had stellar results on a clean room and asking for more money.”
    — Lou Cotterill [26:52]

• Personal Adventure:

  • Lou and her husband lived with nomadic eagle hunters in Mongolia, embracing deep discomfort and the unknown.

    “It was a really incredible way to kind of connect into nature and see a lifestyle that you just may never have seen before...”
    — Lou Cotterill [27:39]

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Conclusion: The Power of Curiosity

Rachel closes the episode tying together Lou’s professional and personal stories:

“You have an insatiable curiosity about you, and it allows you to be a phenomenal marketer and a phenomenal [person].”
— Rachel Tippograph [30:34]

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Key Takeaways for Marketers

• Action is everything: Data, no matter how sophisticated, must lead to concrete marketing actions and sales results.
• Culture changes first: Leadership must be open to change, and new tech should be tested alongside old approaches, not blindly replacing them.
• Bias busting needs structure: Use third-party and independent teams for assessment and measurement.
• Curiosity and pragmatism are essential: Embrace new technologies, but always with a practical eye for what’s actionable and aligned with your business reality.
• Personal bravery underpins professional innovation: Both require the courage to step into the unknown.

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For further learning:
If you found this episode valuable, Rachel and Sarah mention recent episodes featuring other Kellanova leaders at Shop Talk Europe and in prior interviews—find those in your podcast app under BRAVE COMMERCE.

Transcript

[Lou Cotterill]

We will answer your call as soon as we can.

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[Rachel Tippograph]

You.

[Lou Cotterill]

Have to be open that if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it. And so they're two conditions that we have really that we set out right from the start. But when it gets down to the granularity, when people are expecting to see, in the case of Special K perhaps women aged in those age demographic boundaries and you come back to them and you say I've got a behavioural defined audience and the age Range can be from 20 to 65. And it can be men, it can be women, but behaviorally, they've got these commonalities that are really unifying them that we think we can address with advertising. That's another really important part. You can find a thousand problems, but it's the role of advertising that I really care about.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Welcome to today's episode of Brave Commerce. I'm Rachel Tippograph, the founder and CEO of Mic Mac. And I'm Sarah Hofstetter, chairwoman of Profitero Plus. And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest brands. So, Christina, been meaning to ask you this for about five years now. Why'd you join Profitero?

[Sarah Hofstetter]

I joined Profitero for me. Yeah, because of Sarah Hofstetter, which is real. You did recruit me in, but the core of why I joined was at the time, Profitero was a Data company, a SaaS company, and that was the vast majority, if not all, of our revenue. And you identified an opportunity in the market because when you came in about six or eight months before I did, you talked to all of our customers and what our customers were saying were, you all are a data company, but we need more. Like, we want you to be our e commerce people, like, help us do more than just data. And I came in because it was this great opportunity to help our customers move from data to insights to action and really understand how do you get the most out of the data sets and the actual insights that can be discerned from tools like Profitera. That was the main reason I came in.

[Rachel Tippograph]

I think one of those things starts with one of our core values as a company. But I think a lot of people think like this, which is just the obvious. Think like a customer reverse engineering success from the perspective of customer. So you joined because you saw all these companies are awash in data, but they don't necessarily know where or how or what to do next. Our next guest, Louise, or Lou, if you're close with her like we are, is an expert at that signal to noise ratio from the inside out. So many times there are companies that come to us and say, hey, we really. What we need is more data. I think the world has realized there's just too freaking much of it. And the question is, so what now?

[Sarah Hofstetter]

What?

[Rachel Tippograph]

What do I do with this? And it becomes so hard to not just isolate what data do I need and why do I need it, but what am I going to do with it?

[Sarah Hofstetter]

One of the things that Lou talks A lot about that. I really encourage listeners to play close attention to is this balance between the hard skills and there's very interesting innovation in the world of clean rooms, but also the soft skills to get the most out of them. And that's inclusive of things like speaking the language of the executive team, making sure that you're bringing all cross functional teams along with you. One of the things you and I talk a lot about is merchandising success and kind of bringing people along for the journey. And I love that she's kind of blending both of these things. I think there's a lot to learn both in terms of leadership lessons, just in general, when there's a new technology or a new way of thinking, how do you deploy that? And practically speaking, if you're a marketer and you're not using some of these technologies, you're going to start to fall behind. So there's a lot of meat here.

[Rachel Tippograph]

When we get to the final question of what's the bravest thing you've ever done? Stick around for the personal one, but I think you just foreshadowed the professional one as well.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yes.

[Rachel Tippograph]

So with that, let's bring Lou onto the show.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

Let's do it.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Today we are happy to have Luis Cotterill. Did I do that okay?

[Lou Cotterill]

Absolutely. Nailed it.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Awesome. Global senior director insights and intelligence at Kelo Nova. Lou, thank you so much for joining us today here live at Grocery Shop.

[Lou Cotterill]

I know. Thank you for having me. There's a bit of calm in amongst the chaos at the conference, so it's a joy to be here.

[Rachel Tippograph]

The podcast studio has its benefits. You can come back from time to time just for your moment of Zen. Well, we're going to go real deep, real fast. One of the things that has been so remarkable about your career and particularly your more recent roles at Kellanova, is tangible proof, tangible proof that the things that are being done are actually driving business outcomes. And I know that that sounds maybe to somebody who might be newer to our industry, like a no duh, and yet it is one of the more complicated things to do. There are so many stakeholders when you have to prove something to be true. When you think about the impact that marketing can have for advertising to drive sales, how did you get your CFO and your executive team aligned with not just the story, but the actual meat behind it?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah, I mean, I've had the privilege of working in marketing my whole career. And so I've run every gambit, every role, and I've felt every heartfelt rejection and every joyous, exuberant moment of when success lands. And that journey has taught me, as with all marketers, if you want to have a seat at the table for the executives, you have to speak their language. And the language they speak is sales. And you can go in with lots of other metrics and broader pieces to complement that story. But at the heart of the business, it has to be about sales. And that's really one of the most exciting things about clean rooms. It's not the only way and the only benefit, but what we're able to do for the very first time in my career is really produce a closed loop sales qualification that says this happened exclusively because of my advertising. And as a marketer, there is no better feeling than walking in and being able to show to that CFO that lift that impact in the terms they explicitly want to talk about for our audience.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Because some are very familiar with clean rooms, some are still getting into that based on their way that they got into the commerce business. So can you simplify for a noob, what's a clean room and how does it work?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah. So clean rooms, there's, as with everything, there's a broad spectrum of different ways you can use them and have them. Probably a lot of your audience is most familiar with retailer clean rooms, where they give you permission within that tenant to create an audience, an addressable audience. That's the really exciting part to understand more specifically about the people who are buying your food in their specific store. What's different about how we've approached it is that we actually stood up our own tenants. And so within that, we were able to decide what data came in and we could decide what models we wanted to build in order to prioritize and really reflect the business results that we were looking for. What that also meant is we were able to keep the commercials in line with our commercials, because every time you layer in a new data set, you add in a new cost to the business and that impacts your CPM and impacts your roi. And so we set up our own tenant. And within that, one of the pieces I was absolutely adamant about from the start is that we had to be able to measure any impact. And what we love about it is we're not talking so often in marketing, we're talking about averages or generals or model data from panels and things like that. But in addressable, we're talking millions and millions of records. In this case, which was the UK, we were talking about 25 million records. It's a wonderful opportunity for AI to come in and step in and take on and understand the patterns that perhaps you wouldn't see with the human eye. There's no way anyone could possibly see what's going on at that rate. And so we blend lifestyle data, we bring shopping behavior data, and we blend that to pull this bigger picture of who the consumer is in a way that helps us better inform our creative and better inform our media channels as well. And so we did that and we've been doing it but on the journey, pray about three years now, and each time the results just get stronger. We understand what's happening and what's great about the results is they don't just tell you what worked, it tells you who it worked with. So it suddenly starts to become repeatable and then the joy of the marketer is to figure out why did it work with that group. And so you can really kind of take the whole journey and really geek out on the data that you can get from a clean that you probably can't get from a lot of other channels.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

Yeah, I want to pick up on.

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[Sarah Hofstetter]

So one of the things you're digging into is being data driven, but then also how do you bring people along for that journey, something that you might intrinsically understand and believe to be true when you look at the data, it might take other groups, a couple of ats, if you will, to really understand it. So can you talk us through, especially through the lens of audiences and like a more general approach that marketers would take is okay, let's target women 24 to 44, but you're obviously getting much more specific based on this methodology that you've articulated. How are you bringing people along on that journey with you?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah, so there's a couple of things. So my role, although we do a lot of work in clean rooms, I actually look at how we embed AI into marketing. And so we do tests constantly across all different brands, from strategy to planning, creative media measurement all the time. And there's two key things that are consistent whether I'm doing a strategy forecasting or a measurement piece. And the one is that you have to have a leadership that's open to a different way of doing things, because if you're not open to doing different things, then this isn't going to work. And the second one is you have to be open that if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it. And so they're two conditions that we have really, that we set out right from the start. But when it gets down to the granularity, when people are expecting to see, in the case of Special K, perhaps women aged in those age demographic boundaries and you come back to them and you say, I've got a behavioral defined audience. And the age range can be from 20 to 65, it can be men, it can be women, but behaviourally they've got these commonalities that are really unifying them that we think we can address with advertising. That's another really important part of you can find a thousand problems, but it's the role of advertising that I really care about. Some of it has to be addressed by price back architecture, some of it by promotional strategy, some by distribution. What is advertising going to solve? And so we go on that journey with them, we take them through but at no point are we saying, let's flip the switch, stop doing all that targeting. So we run business as usual targeting alongside clean room targeting, and we measure both in exactly the same way. And. And then we can compare like, for, like, how is it performing? So that gives teams a comfort that they've not thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they've not suddenly gone all in on an unproven model or technology, but they're systematically testing their way in. And I think one of the other really important parts of this is that this isn't shining a light on homework that hasn't been done or something like that. This is the first time marketers will get the opportunity to really see how their advertising is performing. And so you've just got to be open and lean in and know that no one's being judged by any results. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and that's also okay. And so it's about creating that culture where everyone's okay to fail, but fail quickly.

[Rachel Tippograph]

As we look at that, one of the things you said, you know, you have to be comfortable. If the data tells you what to do, then you gotta do it. But sometimes data can tell lots of different stories, and sometimes you can bend the data to tell a story based on sharing some, but not all.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah.

[Rachel Tippograph]

How do you eliminate the bias in the data as cleanly as possible without it? You know, like, basically, how do you make sure that you take the bias out of the data, but also make sure that it's there to serve a critical function?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah. And it's actionable because, you know, you can get so much data and it not be actionable. So one of the amazing resources we have at Kalanova is we have a team of internal data scientists, and they are empowered and enabled to fully access the data and pull the reports and write the reports in terms of who the audience should be to target. What's great about that is that they've got no skin in the game. They just produce what the models tell them are the best performing. What's really important is they partner with insights, though, because there can be pieces about just we couldn't either act on, or perhaps they're geographically segmented and they're just not practical for relaying into a CPM model. And so we work with them on that part. The other part, in terms of measurement, that's all done by a third party. So we're not on point to put that measurement together. It's done through a retailer and the channel and Then a third party who puts that together, and then they give you the results and that analysis as well. So there's an independence in that as well. So the starting model is the data science team. I can tell you they've got no real sort of strong feelings about who Special Case should be and no bias in legacy data like our marketers have. And so they will tell you the results as the results come through. And then independent, verified measurement of the results on the external piece is really critical as well.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

And I have to imagine a key part of this, kind of linking back to one of the first things you said of speaking the language of the executives. The insights have to be both actionable and tied to driving sales. And then that can be how you really kind of marry these disparate groups of. We're all trying to achieve the same thing.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yes. And, you know, often, and we talk about this a lot, and our cgo, Cherise Hughes talks about that often. What's really important is that everyone has a line behind the one common problem. Because in very large organizations, it can be easy to, you know, rgm. I know how to solve it with rgm. Oh, it's distribution. I know how to solve it with distribution. Advertising. I know how to solve with advertising. And actually getting a unification of what the problem is so that you're pulling the right levers at the right time in the right sequence is part of that problem. And if you're all chasing the same metric, that can be one of the amazing things to unlock and create that unification. And so we're not chasing vanity metrics over here and saying, it's worked over there. We're all working towards that same piece, which is sales today. And of course, marketing's got that eye on sales tomorrow as well. Yeah.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

I'm smirking because my background is in management consulting, and I'm kind of a true believer in people respond to incentives. And so, yeah, if you got a hammer, you find a bunch of nails. But if everyone's kind of operating around a cohesive set of KPIs, it tends to drive better outcomes.

[Lou Cotterill]

100%. Yeah.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Would you mind putting a little more meat on the bones with an example? You've mentioned Special K a couple of times. But whether it's Special K or any of the other beautiful brands in your portfolio, anything you feel comfortable sharing with us to put a little bit more visualization into how this all comes to life.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah. So Special K is a really good example, though. We've just got some fantastic results in from more recently. But Special k in the UK, a premium brand, 2024 arrives, cost of living crisis hits and we start to see penetration is stable, but volume is declining. Worryingly for a marketer, we see that consideration is at parity with private label. That's not where you want to be when you've got a wonderful legacy brand like Special K. The levers available in that situation may be price pack architecture, but it'll take too long. Promotions would weaken the equity on Special K. And so what we were left with is how can advertising make this immediate impact? The challenge we had is that we had a one size fits all approach. We had one creative, one media target sent across all the different channels. But consumers weren't responding in that way. People were responding differently to the cost of living crisis. Some people were trading down, some people were buying less frequently, some people were completely left branded products altogether. And so we couldn't afford that level of waste to go out in our advertising. And so what we wanted to do is find a better way to target our audiences. Special care had no 1p data at this point. So we are not looking at kind of like leveraging 1P data to build this audience, but we are actually looking at it. How can we find addressable data sets? There isn't one addressable data set that would answer that. And so we had to build together different audiences of different data sets to build a better picture. We identified different sizable cohorts. And that's the key thing as well. We're not talking micro segments here, we're talking big segments. And we tailored the creative, we actually tailored the media plan around the audience, which is so often done a different way. How do I find this audience on this platform? It's now, how do I find the right platform for this audience? And then we deployed that and then measured that through the closed loop system with retailer data and platform data on exposure. And that's where we're able to see the special case at 36% sales uplift versus the control, which was a phenomenal result for us to get within that.

[Rachel Tippograph]

To pick a little further, there's so many different components to what you just said, which is why we started this whole conversation in clean rooms in the first place. There's audience segmentation, there's also how the product shows up relative to its competition. So when you think about there's, there's almost like three P's that go into this people product placement. As you think about how those all work together organizationally, you're highlighting where the opportunity is, how do you get the people responsible for the people, the product and the placement to work cohesively to make that happen?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah. And that is certainly a journey on the maturity curve with clean rooms. What started out very much when we began this journey three years ago was it's a tactical tool. It was a tactical tool to find a better audience. And then you start to see these insights come through and you're like, we need to bring this upstream. And so where we are now is that it's definitely shaping creative briefs, it's shaping media strategies, and it's shaping our measurement. The next evolution of that is absolutely start to cross commercial domains. That's on our roadmap, but we're not there yet. But because I think one of the biggest things you can do is, is you can get fantastic results. You know, you can play a system to your point, you could layer in some bias and you could get an amazing result, but unless you can actually embed a change, it isn't going to sustain. And so when we build our programs, we look across six different metrics. Business results take the biggest weight of that, but also we look at how did it impact people? People still like their jobs at the end of this process, or do they want to quit and work and go home? Right. That's a really important part of it. We also look at process. Does it fit into how we run as a business? To your point, when we start bringing cross commercial domains, it's a big shift to our process and are we ready and do we have to change management in place to try and do that? We look at the partner. Was the partner a good fit? Clean rooms, like I said, they're a different spectrum. You can get a fully managed service to bring your own data into. Somewhere in between. Did that really fit? Did the technology sort of adapt and did we execute like we said we did? Did the data, was it commensurate with our sort of commercials? And so whilst the. The business results are really important, the behavior change is really critical because otherwise you can't sustain it. And so we have to take it at a pace that matches where the business is in the organization. And that's how we're kind of layering it in and bringing it through.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

I think it's really helpful to kind of hear you articulate this crawl, walk, run approach of the massive organizational change required to, you know, squeeze all the juice out of this initiative. If we can get specific. When you think about the future of personalized marketing, where do you think it's going? And if You're a marketer listening to this. What do you think is most critical for your role within that ecosystem in this broader evolution in terms of what's on the horizon?

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah, I think if I was a marketer listening to this, I think the key is it's very easy to be seduced by AI right now. It's very easy to get caught up in buzzwords and sort of, you know, the promise of this nirvana state that everything can be automated and personalized and things like that. I've only had an opportunity to be at a few of the talks so far, but I feel there's a pragmatism that's coming into some of the talks around AI right now. So where we have been historically has been this very static definition of a consumer, that one size fits all approach. Where we're moving to is a more dynamic picture of who the consumer is. But the reality around potentially agentic AI building consumers and profiles, signals based on browsing, history, basket competition, perhaps lapsed signals, that's all possible, but it actually requires fundamental shifts in media because media is. You're rewarded for scale and reach. So if you go down to that one to one personalization, your CPM will probably be no longer commercially viable. And it also relies on retailers releasing a data set that would be allowed to be co mingled with other data. So you could create a consumer purchase graph. And that's probably not going to happen at the moment in the foreseeable future. So where I see it right now is we're at a really interesting stage. Clean rooms are still absolutely in their infancy. We talk to a lot of other brands and they're still learning and trying to work out how do we do this. The key is that you've got to meet the consumer where they are and meet their expectations. And that's the number one thing a marketer has to do. And whether that's hyper personalized, whether that's dynamically personalized, whether that's static personalized, that's where you've got to meet them. And so it's a journey and I think we are really leaning into this kind of promised land, which is very exciting, but with a hint of pragmatism on top. Yeah.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

One thing we talk about a lot is, excuse me, like what needs to be true. And so through the lens of you have all these tools, but what needs to be true for those tools to be actionable. Yeah, I think you just hit a number of things that are worth studying to make sure that you don't get trapped by the shiny object syndrome of what might be out there if you can't take action on it to drive sales. It's not relevant yet.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yes, exactly. That and insights that are actionable, audiences that are big enough creative that warrants a different creative. I mean, that's really important as well. So it's still. We're definitely still learning on this journey. And every time we do one, we get smarter, which is really fulfilling. But we're certainly just scratching the surface on what the potential is for cpg.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Sounds great. Well, on that note, we have to ask you our famous last question. What's the bravest thing you've ever done?

[Lou Cotterill]

I know I was prepped for this one. I think professionally the bravest thing was walking into a global meeting with our executives, telling them that we had not had stellar results on a clean room and asking for more money. That was a pretty felt.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

They loved it.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah, that was a really strong move. Personally, I've been fortunate to travel a lot around the world, and I was trying to racking my brains on what would be the best thing to say, and I think probably the bravest one, because it was the most unknown, is that my husband and I spent a summer living with the nomadic eagle hunters in Mongolia. And so.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Haven't heard that one.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

Yeah, that's new.

[Rachel Tippograph]

We've done at least 250 episodes. Nope, nope. That's a new one. Check the box.

[Lou Cotterill]

Yeah. So we flew to Ulaanbaatar and we headed west as far as Mongolia will go like a thousand miles. And we got in a car. And Mongolian culture is very hospitable by nature. It's not uncommon just to knock on someone's door. It could be 10 o' clock at night, they could be asleep, they'll open the door, they'll make you a meal, and then you carry on on your journey. And so we drove hours and hours to reach the family that we were staying with. And we. And we stayed with them as part of their sort of lifestyle. And it was a incredibly enlightening, very humbling, really incredible way to kind of like connect into nature and see a lifestyle that you just may never have seen before. But it was absolutely unknown. I mean, not like we could speak the language, not like we had any sort of prior knowledge of what this experience would be like. We just got in the car and with our translator and we headed out. And there were some amazing experiences on that way as well.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

Wow.

[Rachel Tippograph]

I need another podcast episode. Yes.

[Sarah Hofstetter]

We should have spent the last 30.

[Lou Cotterill]

Minutes on this is my realization I.

[Rachel Tippograph]

Have to ask one question. What was the catalyst for that? It feels like you open up like an atlas obscura and you just point, and it's just there. So how did you even end up here?

[Lou Cotterill]

So I think we had read about or seen a show. There's an amazing festival they have in Mongolia with the eagle hunters, an incredible traditional nomadic farming community. And these golden eagles are just their. Their livelihood and their pride. You know, they'll make a connection with them for 10 or 12 years. They're just part of who they are. And I think we'd seen this program, and we were like, this is something we know nothing about and can't even begin to imagine. And then we started looking into it, and we were like, let's do it. Let's go, and we'll go and live in a. Well, they actually were very generous. They said we could live in. In the. With them, with their family. And the culture is very hierarchical as well in terms of where you can sleep and sit. And we did say we'll sleep in a tent. And so we did sort of step away from that. But, yeah, I mean, we were out one day, and we were by a lake, and someone said, you know, my daughter's getting married. Please come to our wedding this afternoon. And we found ourselves at a traditional nomadic Mongolian wedding, and we were the honored guests because we. Your, again, the hierarchical structure is your. How far you've traveled makes you more important. And suddenly we're at the top table. And, you know, it was the experience like no other registry was. Like, yeah, when I say top table, I may be overselling what the situation was, so. But it was. Yeah, it was. It was phenomenal. And now, you know, once you've experienced things like that and you've. You've certainly lived a nutrition diet that's very different to your own. You sort of feel like you can take on almost anything, really. So it was a great experience.

[Rachel Tippograph]

I wonder what the total addressable market for Special K would be in Western manga.

[Lou Cotterill]

I probably could have packed it in my backpack.

[Rachel Tippograph]

It's a great sampling opportunity. Well, Lou, I would say there is something that is consistent in the entire theme of this podcast, even if this audience cannot necessarily piece it together. Allow me to wrap it all up. It's curiosity. You have an insatiable curiosity about you, and it allows you to be a phenomenal marketer and a phenomenal. So thank you so much for joining us today.

[Lou Cotterill]

Gosh, thank you. No, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you, Lou.

[Rachel Tippograph]

I don't know if I'm ever going to find somebody to top that bravest thing. That is pretty absolutely out there. With that in mind, if you liked this episode and you're looking for more, I have no other Eagle episodes. However, if you want to hear more about what Kellanova's been up to actually, at Shop Talk Europe we had a live recording with Loretta Franks and before that we had an episode with Julie Bowerman at Kellanova. So if you want to get all Kenova out, there are some episodes for you to listen to. If you like what you heard, please drop us a line and let us know. Leave a review if you really enjoyed it, share it. Sharing is caring. We'll see you soon.

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[Lou Cotterill]

Say what you want about AI, but it's here and it's helping businesses get more done in a day. Wix's website builder is infused with AI so you can stay ahead. Create a beautiful, functional website just by describing your idea, track how your site appears in AI search results, create custom images on demand, or launch an entire campaign in a matter of minutes. WIX gives you AI wherever you need it. Try it now for [e-mail] hi, I'm Jackie Cooper, Global Chief Brand Officer at Edelman and the host of Touch of Truth, a new podcast launching on the Adweek Podcast Network. My dad gave me this incredibly smart piece of advice. Meet everyone once. As a result, I've met some of the most fascinating and inspiring people on the planet. Now on Touch of Truth, we're coming centre stage and sharing the mic to experience stories of truth, insights and visions for the future that will challenge your way of thinking. Touch of Truth is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes come out every Tuesday. I do hope to see you there.